...In my old flat, my cat Neko would always watch invisible things running around in my bedroom. Only in the bedroom. She'd sit there, following something around with her eyes, ears, body movements. Sometimes she'd run after it and jump to a spot on the carpet that was empty to my eyes, as if she was trying to catch something. Once she ran up to the wall and jumped up with all four paws. There was no spot, no reflection, nothing. People have been suggesting she could have been hunting the ghosts of my pet rats...

I work at a bar in a theatre, and supposedly there are two resident ghosts, but I've never seen them. They had some kind of medium come in once, and apparently one of the two was a friend of an old staff member and likes to run around onstage! We do have a lot of weird exploding glass, though, and occasionally, in one particular area, things will flip off the bar in a way that does not jive with my usual understanding of physics--but never when I'm looking directly at them.

Actually, the scariest thing that ever happened to me in that building was when I interrupted a robbery in progress once, but that's another story for another thread. (I was fine, dude ran off, just scared the bejeezus out of me.)

The night my grandfather died, I was woken up by the light in our bedroom turning on by itself at about 3am. I looked over and my husband was fast asleep and I even asked him in the morning if he knew the light went on in the middle of the night. He didn't know anything about it. I get up to go pee and my left arm is freezing cold but my face/nose was fine. I felt a draft in the bathroom which is kind of odd but figured my husband had left a window cracked in one of the rooms. After checking, the windows were closed and it wasn't drafty/cold anywhere else. I went back to sleep.

The night before our flight to go to my grandfather's funeral, our living room light went on by itself. It isn't operated by a switch like our bedroom light. It needs be turned on physically and it is somewhat tricky to do, I have a hard time doing it sometimes. I went downstairs to turn the light off and that was that. I should also say that in the 4 years we've lived there, neither of these things have ever happened.

So I didn't figure I'd share these things but my mom told me she had some similar experiences. She said on the day he died, she felt one of her arms go freezing cold. She also had some other weirdness happen as well.

_________________You are all a disgrace to vegans. Go f*ck yourselves, especially linanil.

Not really a ghost story, but I thought this might be appropriate here. I didn't get much sleep last night because shortly after I had drifted off to sleep, I jolted awake. My boyfriend woke a second later and said, "There's something wrong with this place." I said, "Why?" and he answered, "Something bad happened here," then promptly fell asleep. He says he doesn't remember waking up or saying that, and that he had a great night's rest.

Maaaaaaaaaan. I'm creeped out now. Did I mention I live in the last two-flat before a cemetery? I can see it out my bedroom window.

Not really a ghost story, but I thought this might be appropriate here. I didn't get much sleep last night because shortly after I had drifted off to sleep, I jolted awake. My boyfriend woke a second later and said, "There's something wrong with this place." I said, "Why?" and he answered, "Something bad happened here," then promptly fell asleep. He says he doesn't remember waking up or saying that, and that he had a great night's rest.

Maaaaaaaaaan. I'm creeped out now. Did I mention I live in the last two-flat before a cemetery? I can see it out my bedroom window.

My hubby and I used to work together as diver/archaeologist on a pirate shipwreck that sank in the early 1700s. The site is about 1500 feet off the beach, but we used motor further offshore, drop anchor and stay out nights (on the boat) for several days at a time. On this one occasion we had a film crew with us - sound guy, videographer and a reporter - plus the boat captain, our boss, a writer and three or four guys. It was a full boat, people sleeping on deck, in bunks, on the floor - anywhere! Warm, clear summer night, flat calm, perfect conditions. Sleeping like babies. I always sleep with ear plugs - those guys can snore!

I was woken at about 4 am by my husband shaking me awake and two of the documentary guys and one of our divers freaking out. Apparently the four of them had been woken by a huge crash (like someone throwing a bucket of silverware on a stone floor they said) and a loud yell, and the guys thought a boat had run into our anchor line in the dark and flipped over or something. We all scramble up on deck to start rescue ops/call the coasties etc. but there.was.nothing.there.Nothing. Flat seas. All the gear where it should be. Nothing out of the ordinary at all.

Now, if it had just been the hubby, I'd have said he was full of shiitake. But the other three were hard-core, no-nonsense professionals. And they heard it too. And they were flipping out.

Eventually we all head back to bed and next day, just for the hell of it, we decide to dive right where we are - way off the main site that we've been working on and well away (we think) from the wreck. And guess what...

We drop right onto a cluster of artefacts. Buckles and buttons and a couple of coins from the early 1700s. Personal belongings in other words. Jeebus, I nearly had a cow... Was the huge crash this guys way of telling us where he was, where to look for him? Who knows.

BTW, the ship that we're working on ran aground in the early hours of the morning. At about 4 am. Yeah...

So anyway, later that summer, we're out there again with just a skeleton crew (no pun intended!) of the two of us, plus one boat hand, boat captain and our boss. Boat is anchored up, boathand and I are on deck, captain in the wheel house, boss below decks, hubby under the water on a long umbilical cord of air and communications. It's foggy as heck, very low visibility, very quiet. Hubby's talking to me from the seabed, reading off various measurements, when he suddenly starts screaming. Blood-curdling, no-bullshit, screaming.

He's yelling that he's being dragged along the seabed, and I look at the boathand and the umbilical is ripping through his hands, and he can't stop it and it keeps paying out and all the time I'm hearing what I think is my husband dying on the seafloor 30 feet below me. Then he screams he's at the surface, so I'm yelling for help, running round the rail of the boat trying to find him. He's popped up on the other side of the boat and he's hanging on to the rail for dear life, getting pulled under all the time. I grab his gear, the boat hand tries to grab his arm, our boss comes running out panic-stricken and I'm screaming at him to get a forking knife and get this shiitake off my husband because if he doesn't we're both going under cos I'm not letting go and eventually boss gets it together and manages to cut off the dive harness.

[OK, I forgot to breathe while I was writing that]

So, we haul hubby into the boat and he's talking about getting keel-hauled and we're trying to figure out what's going on when we hear breakers. We look up and through the fog we can see the forking beach. We're running aground, just like the wrecked ship did. Captain runs up to the wheelhouse, we run to the bow and discover that the anchor line - about 1.5 inch diameter rope - has been cut.

Not frayed, not worn through, but cleanly sliced through with what must have been a very sharp blade. what the fizzle.

(I wish I could say that we booked it out of there ASAP but we had a little problem. See, in order for us to work on this site we had to blow the sand away from the wrecksite by directing the force of the boat propellers down towards the seafloor. To do that we use a prop-wash divertor - a huge metal tube that drops over the props and is secured on the underside of the hull. That divertor stays in place all day, and has to be raised before we can use engines to move the boat. So that means a diver has to go under the hull to release the catches so that we can motor away from the beach and out to safety.

Usually this is no problem - but we're usually in 30 feet of water. And now we're in 15 feet of water and the boat is 10 feet deep and the swell is about 5 feet high and the hull keeps bouncing off the bottom. And the only diver is my poor hubby. Yep, he got back in the water and made like Indiana Jones, timing his swims under the boat so he didn't get crushed to death. Basically, he saved the day. And us. And the boat.)

There were many spooky happenings at sea and on land but my dog is whining at me and desperate for a pee so I'll tell you more some other time.

There's also the requisite cheesey stuff, best of which was a replica of an iron gibbet with a fake body in it - supposed to be a pirate who had been hanged and his body left dangling in this metal body-shaped cage in the harbor as a warning for other pirates to repent. icky. The fake skull was by itself in the top of the gibbet and body in a separate section below, and it was positioned so it would be the first thing that people coming into the museum would make eye contact with. Kids luuuuurved it!!

So one night we're in bed and the burglar alarm goes off downstairs. We're the only people in the building so we stagger out of bed, grab torches (flashlights!) and head downstairs to see what's happening. We're down in the museum in our jammies/tighty whities, wandering around, nothing wrong, no doors unlocked, no windows broken, no-one hiding in the bathroom, no0one on the pier, all just peachy. The police show up and we tell them all is well and they leave again.

Then we do a final walk through to switch off the lights and nearly shiitake a brick.

The skull in the gibbet is turned all the way round so it's facing the opposite direction. Out the window, towards the water. Definitely not the way it was facing when we locked up that evening.

Seriously, my knees went to jelly, I thought I was going to puke. We legged it out of there and up to our room so fast...

Next morning we had to fix the skull so it was back in its normal position and let me tell you, it's not an easy job when your hands are shaking and sweaty with fear.

This happened a couple more times while we were staying there and by the time we moved out we figured that whoever (whatever?) was doing it was just having a little fun. Pirate humor. Scallywaggery.

OK, thassit for now. Still got a couple more to share, but they'll have to wait 'til the boss has left the building!

Bastah - I know, he was a crazy mustardC.D. - Do it! Abbierae - no clue... The cut was too high up to be a swimmer/kayaker, and we'd have seen and heard another boat coming in that close. Just... bizarre.

I m convinced there is either a ghost or someone squatting in our garage. Lately every time I go down to do laundry the light has turned on. I kept convincing myself that I must have left it on or Nate did. Lst night I started laundry then we went out to dinner, I made sure to turn the light off. When we came home and I went to put it in the dryer, the light was on. I made Nate come into the garage with me and he turned off the light and shut the door. crasshole. There is alsoa crawl space behind our garage so someone could be living in there. I locked the garage door from the outside last night. I guess we will see if the light is on today.

OK, here's another. No pirates this time though, but it's my personal fave and not at all scary.

A few years ago I was with a friend in London and we went to this pub in Wapping, overlooking the River Thames. It's in an old renovated warehouse, right on the river bank, and the bar room is maybe 10-15 feet above the river. (I can't remember the name - might be the Captain Kidd?).

So anyway, it's after dark, and we're sitting at a table in the window looking out over the dark river to the lights on the other side. Because it's dark out there, and light inside, we can see the reflection of everything in the pub behind us.

So I'm gazing out at the view and I see some movement in the reflection of the pub, so I focus in on that and there's the cutest dog sniffing around the empty table and chairs a few feet behind us - a little brown beagle/jack russel type-looking dog, just nosing around the floor for stray nibbles. Everyone was ignoring it, which I thought was kind of weird, because he (or she) was freeaking adorable.

"Oooh, look at the puppy" says I to my friend, and turn around to pet him and rubble his little ears, but - no dog. Anywhere.

(I should say, I'd only just arrived and started my pint, so booze wasn't an issue, and we were way too high above the river for it to be below the window. Plus, pup would have been swimming!)

I wonder if it was an imprint (is that what you call it?) of one of the rat-catching dogs they used to keep in the warehouses (back in the 1800 - 1900s) to keep the rodent population down? Dunno. But he sure was cute...

(Sidebar - I kinda lied about the pirates - we were there because Wapping is where they used to hang the pirates in the 17th and 18th century (called Execution Dock even today). It's where Captain Kidd himself was hanged (hung?), hence the name of the pub.)

But, maybe more freaky, I woke up and the sound machine was on. We have this sleep sheep thing next to the bed that I put on sometimes for grey. I usually put in the heartbeat noise. Anyway, I woke up and the waves noise is on. I can't reach it from where I am lying. Maybe th cats turned it on?

Years ago, I was messing with my sister's digital camera. She was standing in the doorway and I took a picture, mostly getting her shirt, which was black. We later uploaded all the pictures and when we came across that one, she was like, "Whoa, wait." Over the front of her shirt was the thickest mist! There were little faces and all sorts of stuff. It was also behind her.

Last year, the glass surrounding the light in the hall, which was not on, exploded.

One time my friend and I were watching a movie and the box fan we had facing away from us had turned and was blowing on us.